Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  SOE’s French section was by far the largest although there was some rivalry because General de Gaulle, who had arrived in England in 1940 to set up a Free French resistance movement and government in exile, had his own resistance-linked operation, known as RF. F section therefore referred to those agents and operations that SOE initiated and controlled; it was entirely British-run. Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who had fought in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), headed the F section with his deputy Major Nicholas Bodington. Buckmaster’s assistant was Vera Atkins, a highly efficient woman in her mid-thirties, who was later commissioned in the WAAF. She served as F section’s Intelligence Officer, working closely with Buckmaster and had considerable responsibility for preparing agents for work in the field, particularly the female agents. She cared for the women agents, looked after their personal affairs and, following the war, set off on a long and arduous task to discover what had happened to agents who had not returned. Within SOE she was seen as a very powerful personality, who achieved almost legendary fame. There were also three smaller French sections: EU/P section which worked with the Poles in France, DF section which set up escape routes and, from 1942, AMF, which was based in Algiers and operated in Southern France.

  Suitable work for women

  During the course of the war, SOE sent about 5,000 agents into Nazi-occupied territory. Initially only men were sent out but from 1942 it was decided to use women as well, particularly in France. There was some opposition but Colonel Gubbins was very keen: he believed that women could do the work just as well as men and had the greater advantage that in occupied France women apparently going about their daily chores would be less noticeable than men. SOE operations in the field were organized around a system of networks, known as circuits, each of which covered a particular area in France. Circuits were given various code names such as Jockey, a circuit in south-east France, or Prosper, which operated around Paris and in north-west France. Many of the circuits had the same code name as their organizer. Some of the circuits, such as Prosper, which became the largest, also had sub-circuits.

  Vera Atkins

  BORN VERA MARIA Rosenburg in Romania in 1907, Vera Atkins was one of SOE’s most significant and remarkable personalities. She came from a wealthy family of Jewish Ukranian origin and studied modern languages at the Sorbonne. She was widely travelled and by 1934 was working in Bucharest as a personal assistant to the head of a large oil company. During this period she made a number of contacts with people in British intelligence, to which she provided information. Owing to the growth of anti-Semitism, in 1937 Vera and her mother left Romania for England and settled in Winchelsea, Sussex; changing their surname to Atkins. Vera joined SOE in April 1941, having been invited to do so by Leslie Humphreys, whom she had known in Bucharest and who was now the first head of SOE’s French section. She became an intelligence officer in F section and assistant to Maurice Buckmaster, section head from September 1941. She was indispensable to Buckmaster, who described her as ‘extremely intelligent, able and reliable.’ She helped to interview potential agents, organized and was involved in their training and helped to plan their reception in France. Vera Atkins also provided cover stories for agents and added essential details such as photos, letters and mementos to keep in their wallets, so creating verisimilitude to their undercover identities. No effort was too great: she poured over every tiny detail of French life during the occupation to keep herself up to date with rations, curfew hours, food stuffs, clothing and so on, on one occasion telling an agent to go to the dentist to have his teeth done in the French manner. Vera Atkins was dedicated and loyal to her agents, who were, after all, facing the most enormous risks and quite likely going to their deaths. She saw them off, took care of their personal details, organized their pay and wills, made sure personal possessions were kept safely, wrote to their families, and organized coded messages via the French section of the BBC so that agents in the field had information about family members left behind. She was quite a controversial person; some saw her as rather unemotional and distant but most of her female agents saw her as their friend and confidante. Families too turned to her for help; the mother of one of the agents who was shot in Dachau, Yolande Beekman, addressed Vera Atkins as ‘dear Miss Atkins’ in a letter asking for information.

  Vera Atkins’sense of responsibility for her agents continued after the war, when she set off into ruined Europe to trace the fates of the 118 agents of F section who did not return. In an interview she once said that she felt she owed them that effort. She discovered the fates of 117 out of the 118 who were missing and was perhaps particularly concerned to discover the fates of thirteen missing women – she referred to them as ‘our girls’ – interviewing and taking written statements from men who had worked at concentration camps, prisoners who had shared cells with some of the women, SOE agents such as Brian Stonehouse, who was confined at Nazweiler concentration camp and had managed to witness the arrival of four SOE agents – Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden and Sonya Olschanezky – who were executed there. In order to do this work Vera Atkins was given the rank of squadron officer in the WAAF, having finally gained British citizenship in 1944. Following her long journey through war-torn Germany, she produced detailed reports of her findings, which she sent to the War Crimes Office of the British Army, and these together with letters of condolence were passed to the families of agents who had lost their lives. The confessions she obtained from Rudolf Hoess – former commandant of Auschwitz – were used in evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.

  From 1947 until 1961 Vera Atkins worked for UNESCO, then took early retirement. She was closely involved with the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, London, which was set up in 1946 by surviving SOE members, becoming its vice-president in 1996. In 1995 Vera Atkins received official recognition of her work when she was awarded the Légion d’honneur; two years later she was awarded a CBE. She died in Hastings on 24 June 2000.

  At the hub of each circuit were three key positions: an organizer, a courier and a wireless operator, each of whom was usually recruited and trained in Britain. The job of the organizer, in most cases a male agent, was to make contact with local people who were either already in the Resistance or who were keen to get a group organized, and to supply local Resistance groups with training, weapons and other supplies. The organizer also pinpointed sabotage targets such as railway lines, factories, weapons dumps and dams. Wireless operators were responsible for maintaining links with London, tapping out coded messages providing up to date information from the field, and arranging for supplies and weapons to be dropped in France. They also received coded messages from London with information about new agents and supplies that were to be dropped in their area. It was a particularly dangerous task: the wireless transmitters themselves were bulky, often with very long aerials, and had to be carried everywhere. The operator needed to be absolutely familiar with his or her coding system and had to code, send and receive messages as quickly as possible at very specific and scheduled times (these were known as ‘skeds’), while all the time German signal-detecting devices were constantly patrolling the area. The risk of being detected was very high: at a rough estimate, wireless operators were not expected to survive for more than six weeks before being discovered. Couriers were responsible for carrying messages, weapons, money and other items between circuits, often over long distances, travelling either on foot, by bicycle or by train; there were no other means of communication in the field. Couriers were constantly on the move, and therefore subject to the risks of police or army checks and travel restrictions. In Gubbins’ view women were eminently suitable for this role: given appropriate cover stories, they would be less likely to arouse suspicion. As time went on women were also used as wireless operators.

  ‘Being a woman has great advantages if you know how to play the thing right… I believe that all the girls, the women who went out, had the same feeling. They were not as suspect as men, they had very subtle minds wh
en it came to talking their ways out of situations, they had many more cover stories… Also, they’re very conscientious… They were wonderful wireless operators and very cool and courageous.’

  (Vera Atkins, SOE)

  There was however still a legal problem. Women in the Allied armed services were banned from taking part in armed combat and, by definition, SOE agents were conducting a guerrilla war. Here again Gubbins found a solution, which was to call on the FANY; being a civilian organization its members were effectively outside the rules that applied to the other services: there was no restriction on the use of weapons. As a result, women who were recruited as agents were commissioned as FANY officers for their time behind enemy lines. It was also hoped if women agents held a rank in the FANY it might offer protection under the Geneva Convention but this soon turned out not to be the case: if captured, women, like men, faced the possibility of death whether they were in the FANY or not. Some female agents, among them Noor Inayat Khan, Yolande Beekman, Lilian Rolfe, Yvonne Cormeau and Diana Rowden, were recruited from the WAAF but once brought into SOE were given FANY commissions. Three of the women agents commissioned into the FANY – Odette Sansom, Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan – were awarded the George Cross after the war, the last two posthumously.

  Captain Selwyn Jepson was SOE’s senior recruiting officer. In an interview for the Imperial War Museum’s sound archives, he said that he was responsible for recruiting female agents, despite considerable opposition from ‘the powers-that-be, who said that, under the Geneva Convention were not allowed to take combatant duties which they regarded resistance work in France as being.’ However in his view, ‘women were much better than men for the work. Women… have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage.’ He took the matter to Winston Churchill, who growled a yes and wished him good luck. To some extent the decision was nodded through but Jepson took it as certain, and recruitment for women began.

  Being recruited

  SOE recruited some remarkable women, most of whom were sent into France. They came from very diverse backgrounds, classes and nationalities. They included journalists, shop workers, clerks, saleswomen and an Indian princess. Many such as Diana Rowden and Vera Leigh, who were both sent into France in 1943, were British; others had British-French nationality. SOE also recruited a number of Frenchwomen, many of whom had already worked with the French Resistance. They included Andrée Borrel and Madeleine Damerment, both of whom had worked with the French resistance, risking their lives helping Allied airmen to escape from occupied France. Andrée Borrel was credited with helping about 600 shot-down airmen before arriving in England; Madeleine Damerment had been betrayed and had escaped to England before volunteering for SOE. Other women included Virginia Hall – an extremely daring American woman with a wooden leg that she nicknamed ‘Cuthbert’; this did not slow her down; the Germans considered her to be one of the most dangerous of the Allied spies – New Zealand born Nancy Wake, who went on to become one of the most highly-decorated Allied servicewomen, Polish-born Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville), Mauritian Lisé de Baissac and a Hungarian Jew and poet, Hannah Szenes, who joined SOE in 1943 and was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assist a partisan group. She was captured, tortured and executed in 1944.

  SOE’s women agents included single and married women, privileged and not-so privileged women. Violette Szabo, for example, whose life as an agent was the subject of the film Carve her Name with Pride (1958) and who was awarded a posthumous George Cross, was the daughter of a French mother and English car dealer. She had worked as a shop assistant on the perfume counter of what is now Morley’s department store in Brixton before the war. She was also a mother with a young child named Tania. Other agents had children too, including Odette Sansom and Yvonne Cormeau. Women’s motives for volunteering for this extraordinarily dangerous work varied: most were very idealistic; they hated Nazism and felt that it was their absolute duty to do their bit for the Allied war effort. Some, such as Yvonne Cormeau and Violette Szabo, also volunteered out of loyalty or revenge for the loss of a husband or fiancé killed in the war. Most of the women who volunteered for SOE were young: Violette Szabo was 23 when she was parachuted into France; Christine Granville was 24 and Noor Inayat Khan was 29, but there were also some older women such as Yvonne Ruddelat, who, aged 45, was one of SOE’s oldest agents.

  Finding suitable agents was not a simple matter and it had to be done in complete secrecy; most usually it was the SOE who approached suitable candidates rather than being approached. Because SOE sent most of its women agents to France the ability to speak French fluently was an absolute priority. Senior SOE staff cast their net fairly wide, keeping a careful eye on women in the armed forces, particularly the WAAF, making notes of women who had spent long periods of time in France, knew the country well, spoke the language fluently and could pass themselves off as French.

  Noor Inayat Khan, for instance, was found this way: her father was Indian and her mother was an American. The family had spent many years in France and she was a fluent French speaker. She joined the WAAF in November 1940 where she gained a reputation for being a first-class wireless and Morse code operator. Seeing her as a potential recruit, SOE approached Noor Inayat Khan in November 1942.

  The SOE also found Yvonne Cormeau through the WAAF. Born in China, educated in Brussels and Edinburgh, she spoke both English and French fluently and also spoke Spanish and German. In 1940 her husband, who was in the RAF, was killed in a London air raid, ironically while at home recovering from being wounded, leaving her on her own with a school-age child. She joined the WAAF and was posted to an RAF bomber station in Lincolnshire and, given her ability with languages, was approached by SOE. In an interview for the Imperial War Museum Yvonne Cormeau said:

  ‘After my husband was killed I joined the WAAF… going into the forces, one had to fill in a great number of questionnaires and when they asked, “What have you as special qualities?” I put down my knowledge of German and Spanish and bilingual French. After a while this got through the Ministry, of course, and then, as they were looking for people for SOE, I was interrogated. I got a telex from London asking that I should come down to town to see a certain Captain Selwyn Jepson.’

  Sometimes chance played a part: Odette Sansom, a French-born woman married to an Englishman and who had lived in England since 1932, came to SOE’s attention when she heard an appeal on the radio for anyone who had photographs of a particular part of the French coast to send them to an address in London. She duly sent in some photographs, she later believed possibly to the wrong address, and some weeks after got a letter thanking her and asking her to come to London for an interview. Assuming this was to collect her photographs, she was rather surprised to be asked a lot of questions. She subsequently received a letter inviting her to a second interview: the SOE had made enquiries about her and believed she had excellent agent potential.

  Odette Sansom

  ODETTE SANSOM BECAME one of SOE’s best-known female agents; she was one of the very few to survive capture and imprisonment and is the only woman to date to have received the George Cross while still alive. She was born Odette Brailly in Amiens, France, in 1912. Her father, a bank manager, was killed at Verdun during the First World War and her family was intensely patriotic, a quality that she inherited. When she was 19 she married an Englishman, Roy Sansom. They moved to England and had three children. When war broke out Roy joined the Army and in 1940 Odette and her children moved to Somerset where her mother-in-law lived. The news from France was bad and she wanted to do more to help the war effort. She responded to a radio appeal for photographs of France and on being summonsed to London was surprised to find herself being interviewed by what turned out to be the SOE. Given her fluency in French, her knowledge of France, and her patriotism she was invited to volunteer to return to France as an agent working behind enemy lines. It was a difficult decision but in the event she felt it was her patriotic duty, so despite leaving her daughters behind, which she
said was ‘heartbreaking’, she embarked on SOE’s training course in May 1942. In October 1942, after various false starts, she was sent to the South of France, travelling from Gibraltar by boat with two other women agents, Mary Herbert and Marie-Therese le Chene.

  Operating under the code name ‘Lise’, her cover story was that she was a widowed Frenchwoman, Madame Odette Metayer. She was attached to the Spindle network in Cannes, led by a dynamic agent Peter Churchill (code name Raoul). At this time the Spindle network was in serious disarray; Churchill and his wireless operator had quarrelled, there had been a number of arrests, and in November German occupation of the Vichy zone had extended to include the Riviera, making Cannes a very dangerous place. Odette worked as a courier for Peter Churchill, as well as organizing and attending supply drops. The arrests continued, and in 1943 Churchill, Odette and others in the network were betrayed by a French double agent and captured. She was brutally interrogated fourteen times, her toenails were pulled out and her back was burned, but she refused to disclose any information about Churchill and the other agents. She told her interrogators she was the circuit leader and that she was married to Peter Churchill, who was the nephew of British Prime Minister Winston Churchll, which he was not. She was condemned to death but never deviated from her story nor gave any information about the network: the sentence was not carried out, probably because of fear of reprisals. She endured two years’ imprisonment, in Fresnes prison near Paris, in Karlsruhe prison, Germany, and, ultimately, in Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was placed in solitary confinement, which she survived ‘from one minute to the next’. Conditions in Ravensbrück were appalling and she suffered dysentery, scurvy and tuberculosis, managing somehow through sheer force of will to stay alive. According to her accounts, she also thought of her daughters. Amazingly she escaped the mass extermination of prisoners in April 1945 just before the camp was liberated, when the camp commandment, who had believed her story about Churchill, drove her to the nearest American troops, hoping to use her as a hostage. She was very ill for some while after the war but fought back to health and died in 1995. In 1946 she was awarded the George Cross: the announcement in the London Gazette of Friday, 16 August 1946 stated that ‘The Gestapo tortured her most brutally… Mrs Sansom, however, continually refused to speak and by her bravery and determination, she not only saved the lives of two officers but also enabled them to carry on their most valuable work. During the period of over two years in which she was in enemy hands, she displayed courage, endurance and self-sacrifice of the highest possible order. ’In 1951 a film, Odette, was released starring Anna Neagle.